In my previous school district, I was the only teacher teaching a physics course with set, district-wide learning outcomes. These same outcomes were also taught in physics classrooms at the other high school in our district. But at our school, I was one of the 2 physics teachers. The other teacher taught the AP-level physics courses. So, in many ways, I had opportunities to incorporate strategies I believed were best for learners and that I found worked best for them without being seen as out of alignment with anyone in our building. My amazing friend and one of my teaching philosophy goddesses, Katie Novak, stated the following misconception about alignment: All teachers must deliver instruction in the exact same way. True alignment, she says, is about shared goals, rigor, and outcomes. Thank you, Katie! Katie has taught me to truly believe that learner variability is the rule, not the exception. I encourage you to take 10 minutes to listen to Katie Novak explain it in the ...
In the book and movie Ready Player One, users visit a virtuality space called the Oasis to play, work, create, and learn. Although the world of the Oasis was set in the future, there are virtual spaces where students can learn and create in today. In a recent episode of Matt Miller’s Ditch That Textbook Podcast , I was introduced to a new virtual reality tool for the classroom by his guest Mike Drezek . That tool is CoSpaces EDU . It is a great tool for teachers and learners to build interactive 3D environments on their own our collaboratively. These environments can be viewed on web enabled devices like smartphones, tablets, chromebooks, and desktops. Smartphones can be put into a VR viewer like Google Cardboard to make the environment a fully explorable VR experience. If you head to the Cospace web site and login, you can explore the gallery of user created environments. If you want to get the VR experience in the gallery, you can download the Cospaced ED...